The Court & The Right To Vote: A Dissent
In light of the recent Supreme Court ruling on provisions of the Voting Rights Act, John Paul Stevens, in The New York Review of Books, examines Gary May’s book Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy. May discusses the development of the act in its historical context of Bloody Sunday, the Birmingham Church bombing, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s activism from the pulpit. Stevens writes, “After quoting a remark made by King a few days earlier—‘We will write the voting right law in the streets of Selma’—May pointed out that King was wrong because, in May’s words, ‘the Voting Rights Act would be written—in blood—on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.’”